Posts made by spiffyweasel 0

@frostycab four?! nay, there are dozens of us. dozens!

to be fair, there are more than enough people in the community, or even just this thread, who can easily point out these fake collections, but there isn't much point in doing so if there is not going to be any action or feedback.

the current "report"ing mechanism is not very effective. an example of how things can be done better - on another private tracker, when a torrent is reported, this is reflected next to the torrent title and the report text is also public, for instance "someone has reported this torrent: <reason>". this makes it pretty clear that there is some pending mod action on that torrent.

@MrMazda to take some concrete examples, are these torrents valid collections?

• British porn collection
• British porn collection part 2
• Euro Fan Sites 43
• Euro Fan Sites 42
• Euro Fan Sites 41
• Brazil porn actors Pack
• [East Boys Eboys Hammer and Vimpex] Studio porn movies scenes collection

i'd actually reported that last monster torrent without seeing any action or receiving any feedback.

@frostycab behold the latest recycled garbage, in case you're in the mood for some fish 'n' chips: British porn collection

on a related note, i've noticed that it's typically just the same set of users on here commiserating with each other about how these new problems are creeping up.

it doesn't look like the admin team has enough bandwidth to address the problems or even chime in with their opinions on the topic. it also doesn't look like there are opportunities to help alleviate their load. i'm resigned to the fact that it not worth my time and energy making suggestions or calling issues out when it seems to have about the same effect as shouting into the void.

@ianfontinell-0 said in naked advertisement spam in torrents:

@spiffyweasel-0 it's definitely not endorsed but on the same not it's not against the rules so, in a sense you're right, everyone can create their own site and advertise it in torrent descriptions.

if you have enough free time and money i suggest you try it so that we will know for real how effective this approach is, but i suspect that it's not great.

another thing is, it'd be hard to check metrics to see who is visiting your links coming from GT because the site removes referers from the URLs, it will look like the person has typed the URL manually instead of clicking an ad.

right, which is why i suspect this is not just some affiliate (since the referer stripping would prevent click tracking as you said) but the actual owner of that site who earns money by running ads on the site itself.

for some time now, there's been this one uploader who regularly posts content typically farmed from other existing torrents, or other low-quality online sources. the signature features of their torrents are:

• a generic title a la "hot latino fucked by bbc", designed to cast a wide net and maximize the number of clicks, and
• a trivial description that contains little more that multiple arbitrary links to an external streaming site, "gaysdream.com".

presumably, this is a struggling promoter trying to drum up traffic for this particular streaming site - kudos for their grind.

is this sort of torrent posting actually endorsed by the moderators though? if so, there's nothing stopping more people from creating their own sites and spamming advertisement links inside recycled clickbaity torrents.

(sorry for the pun in the title btw, couldn't resist

@ianfontinell-0 thanks, clearing the cache didn't work but ctrl-shift-R did the trick.

@spiffyweasel-0 said in Is there something wrong with the layout?:

...and it looks like i can't even submit a helpdesk ticket about it. the messed-up layout disables the "Help me!" button on the ticket filing page making it unclickable.

@MrMazda any suggestions on how i could surface this issue to the relevant folks?

...and it looks like i can't even submit a helpdesk ticket about it. the messed-up layout disables the "Help me!" button on the ticket filing page making it unclickable.

@Unknownforce yes, the layout has been messed up since sometime midday yesterday PST. there are a bunch of JavaScript errors when you load any site page.

@bigdmck thanks!

@frostycab your suggestion about giving feedback on user reports is excellent. you should probably create a separate discussion topic for it here so it gets more attention.

@frostycab maybe we can use a carrot instead of a stick to solve the problem?

well-curated collections can get some special "featured" tag to indicate that they're worth downloading. that could make the site easier to navigate as well, by allowing users to search by the tag and bypass all the spam.

there's precedent for doing this in other open collaborative contexts. for instance, wikipedia.org as well as pbc.xxx have "featured articles", indicated by a star on the top right of the page.

in any case, we can talk all we want but real action will require site admin input. i had reached out to them earlier asking if they are open to accepting new code maintainers or contributors but never heard anything back. maybe it will take another upstart competitor to show up for gaytor.rent to finally up its game.

perhaps these are just blatant attempts at baiting other users into downloading humungous torrents to boost their seeding ratios.

i've noticed a significant uptick in new torrents that are just repackaged forms of previous torrents with a barely coherent theme with flimsy titles like "EU fan sites", "muscle fuck scenes", etc.

there don't seem to be any clear rules to prevent such "collections" from cluttering up the list of torrents, or the enforcement seems pretty lax.

if nothing is done to prevent this type of abuse, it will become harder and harder to find properly indexed content.

clicking on any link on the site now takes me to urlrw.com, which is basically just a front to advertise their products. it doesn't subsequently redirect me to the actual link i clicked on on the site.

can we please get rid of this fake redirection or replace urlrw.com with another link redirector that actually works? alternatively, if there is something i'm doing wrong here that will make this issue go away, please let me know.

@jokuihmemies all modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge, ...) have page translation built-in, so that hurdle can be easily crossed.

of course, there are also other trackers like pornolab.net that don't seem to care about dmca at all.

a recently uploaded torrent was taken down in a record ~3 hours. i'd guess the owner of this content has some special connection to the site that allows them to bypass the standard dmca workflow for reporting copyrighted material.